Comparing Fuji 400 (Made in USA) to Kodak Ultramax: Are they really the same?
With the strong demand for film, suppliers like Kodak and Fujifilm have been struggling to keep up these past years. On top of that, a pandemic accompanied by shortages of raw materials certainly didn’t help. While Kodak seems to be slowly but surely climbing up the hill (meanwhile hiking up the prices), Fujifilm, on the other hand, is still experiencing difficulties with manufacturing due to the lack of material. Moreover, despite its name, Fujifilm produces much more than photographic film, so they may reroute resources to other parts of their business.
Unfortunately, Fujifilm has discontinued several stocks these past years, even in the proline (RIP Fuji 400H Pro). So when we heard that new film stocks would be released in 2023, I was quite excited to see what Fujifilm would come up with. After all, I started film photography over ten years ago with Fujifilm and their excellent Superia 200 colour negative film. It was my dad’s favourite film stock besides Ilford FP4+ and was available in your family. fridge
The new 2023 Fujifilm stocks are simply named “Fuji 200” and “Fuji 400”. Both are daylight-balanced consumer colour negative films and are set to replace, respectively, Superia 200/400 and X-Tra 400 for the North American Market. We are still determining what will happen for the rest of the world, but as of now (September 2023), Superia and X-Tra are still available in Europe. I was excited to see what these new emulsions would bring to the table.
However, we soon started to hear rumours that these stocks weren’t all that new, but essentially, Kodak Gold 200 and Ultramax 400 were rebranded into green boxes marked Fujifilm. While no official announcement confirmed these rumours, several clues were left on the packaging and data sheets. The packages state they’re made in the USA, and the Fuji 200’s datasheet shows similar spectral sensitivity curves to the Kodak Gold 200. And whether these new film stocks are indeed manufactured by Kodak for Fujifilm, I still wanted to try it for myself. I bought one roll of each and took the opportunity of a trip on the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island to shoot both stocks side by side to see the similarities and differences.
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